languist wrote:I'm a native English speaker so my choices at school were the typical French/Spanish/German trio, but being in Ireland, my sister (at a different school) had to choose between Irish and Spanish. Most of the Czechs and Slovaks I know (aged 20-40) talk about picking between either German or English (with some mention of Russian; at 40+, everyone seems to know some Russian) - but maybe Cavesa can tell you more about that! And indeed, I teach a few Korean kids and they have complained about being forced to pick up either Chinese or Japanese at school.
This is not exact. It was not far from reality in some ways 20 years ago. But it is not true these days.
Number one is unfortunately English, whether you want it or not. The government has been pushing it into schools at the expense of German or anything else a lot and it is a huge problem in the border regions. Very few children get the opportunity to start with German or French first and English second (that was my path and I will never stop being grateful for it).They probably want to keep people from migrating en masse for better jobs (=the same job, the same prices, four times the salary) to the rest of the EU. The regions at the borders could really do with better German teaching in general, English is not helping them out of their poverty. They are usually not scientists, their international business is just with the neighbours, and almost nobody but the neighbours visits those regions.
Number 2 is German, for obvious reasons. Everything else is fighting for the third place.
The third place: French is still winning in this lower league, but may soon be overtaken by Spanish. It is getting more popular and the low quality of French teaching plays a part too. It is not rare to see something like in my sister's school, where the kids learning Spanish are already making noticeable progress, while the French learning ones still don't know what is going on, because of a much worse teacher. (no, not because "French is such a hard language", and definitely not because of prosody, as some people suggested recently). A really bad French teacher is likely to get the job due to low competition, while an equally bad English or German one would definitely not get it. The good Spanish ones seem to be numerous enough to cover the small demand. When it grows, I don't know whether Spanish will be like English or German, or like French.
Russian is competing for the third place too. It is not true that people over 40 speak it. They were forced to sit in the class and pass an exam during the communism, they often even had native teachers (usually the wives of the officers of the occupying army, with little teaching skills), but not knowing the language was seen as actually a quality of character, the people really wanting to learn it were mostly the collaborants. Even now, many older people will simply refuse to speak it, even when they would be able to. A part of the younger generation is rediscovering Russian because of the rich businessmen and the tourists, and there are the heritage speakers, those are the reasons for its rising popularity. It will take a few more decades, before Russian loses any political meanings, and we'll all be able to choose it for the best reasons, like Lukyanenko's scifi books, the classical literature, visits of the famous arts museums in Russia, or love for the food.
Completely underestimated are: Polish (an important neighbour), Italian and Croatian (people going there every year for decades would profit from those much more than from English), and other "smaller" languages of the EU.
It is really sad that the language choices are affected primarily by the offer in school (=by the government's unfortunate choice to push English forward too much), then by the myths ("French is such a hard language" or "I can't see how Italian could be practical"), only then by money, and lastly by personal interest.
